Lilian Lepere had the first part of that strategy down. In 2015, Lepere was working as a graphics designer for a printworks in Dammartin-en-Goele, Paris, when two armed gunmen stormed the building and took the manager hostage. Lilian managed to escape and hid in a kitchen cupboard, unaware that two days prior, those same gunmen had attacked the Charlie Hebdo office, where they killed 12 people. As the subjects of a full-scale manhunt, Cherif and Said Kouachi had chosen the printworks as the site of their final showdown.
While his manager patched up the brothers' wounds and offered them pre-shootout hot drinks, Lepere texted his father: "I am hidden on the first floor. I think they have killed everyone. Tell the police to intervene."
When they did, Lepere relayed the positions of the gunmen, what he'd witnessed of their weapons (including a goddamn rocket launcher), and any snippets of conversation he overheard from his perch between the Drano and that old detergent that just didn't work out. It all went swimmingly ... until the police accidentally revealed to the press that they had a literal inside man. As soon as they saw that, the terrorists began a search of the property, and according to Lepere, they were seconds away from discovering his location before they did the world a favor and took the ol' bullet train to hell.
Only hours after the Brothers Kouachi stormed the printworks, co-terrorist Amedy Coulibaly launched an attack on a kosher supermarket, killed four people, took the rest as hostages, and demanded the safe release of the brothers. Amidst the carnage, some citizens were able to escape to an underground storage room. Reasonably sure that this whole terrorist siege thing wasn't going to end well, they texted their friends and loved ones to say goodbye ... which one station, BFMTV, learned of and promptly broadcast without a care in the world: "There's a person, a woman, who might have been hiding from the start in the fridge. And who is probably still there."
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